Comments

1
A very excellent point. Emergency medical workers (ya know, those people responsible for saving your life when shit hits the fan) outside of Seattle get paid the current minimum wage, $9-something an hour. Don't we owe them and countless other professions better?
2
They won't do it because it makes sense, because it's fair, because investing now to get returns in the future is a tried-and-true way to run a society. They'll do it because we have what they want: more money, better transportation, better preschool.


It's actually more pernicious than that - recent history demonstrates over and over that they won't actually want what we have; what they want is to ruin/degrade/destroy what we have to keep us from having it. That's really the most damaging trait of modern Democrats: they refuse to recognize the pure destructive spite of modern "conservatives."
3
Dom - I think there will be an economic factor here that people aren't considering. The labor market doesn't stop at the city's border. Higher paying jobs in Seattle should draw the best workers from surrounding areas to Seattle to find better paying work. In turn, employers outside the city will have to raise wages to compete for quality workers. Let's hope we see this effect.
5
Dom makes the common mistake of lumping all the suburbs together, as if it's all one big Medina. How about working with the poorer cities on this? You may never win over Sammamish, but Tukwila and Seatac and Renton and Lynnwood have a lot of working poor, require a lot of social services and public transportation, have a lot of immigrant families, etc.
6
Didn't the $15/hour actually start in the suburbs? Or is SeaTac not considered a true suburb?
7
@6- Careful, your post might get pulled for pointing out that this didn't all start with a certain councilperson (whose fan club keeps insisting she's solely responsible and everyone else's hard work didn't exist).
8
Meinert raises (ahem) an interesting point...one that works well w/Dom's point about making the suburbs jealous. Or folks who work there anyway.

I'm thinking about a drug store (Walgreens? Bartell?) that sits on the north (Shoreline) side of 145th and Aurora. If folks on the south (Seattle) side of the street suddenly start making way more, that drug store is either going to have to raise its wages to compete or settle for employees that can't get jobs anywhere else.
9
Yep, it just means that Seattle will get the best workers, and the suburbs will have to pay up if they want to compete.
10
Dom is cute thinking he will be making people envious with owning a highly taxed $400,000 900 sq foot tear down or totally wanting to live with out cars. I would love to be that deluded.
11
There is a serious flaw to your reasoning here Dom.

Renton, Enumclaw, Woodinville, Edmonds, Maple Valley and the small cities outside of King county. These are your "suburbs" and that's are where all the poor people are now.

The poor people are the ones acting against their own interests. They're the ones voting down the transit and tax proposals.

Convince them.
12
Poor people are not voting against their interests. They're more likely to vote for progressive economic policies than middle-income and rich people, when they bother to vote. But they don't bother to vote, because the process doesn't usually include their needs so change never seem to amount to anything.

The people who kill reform in the suburbs are the FYIGM crowd. Upper middle class. Detached home. Multiple cars. Never seen the inside of a bus. And no social conscience. To win you have to appeal to their jealousy. If the city gets better workers and less poverty, and the suburbs get poorer because of low pay, those people have two choices: most likely, a reverse white flight back into the cities OR raising suburban standards to match the city. Part of the solution really needs to be taxing the rich wherever they are, so they can't just run and hide from responsibility to their neighbors as is their way.
13
@12 The last vote for the Metro plan utterly defies your thesis. The areas that voted it down were the lower income districts. As has nearly every election in the last twenty years. Seattle proper is now the wealthiest district in the state. It mostly votes progressive.

The same happens with state-wide progressive votes. The poorest counties - Eastern Wa counties - nearly always vote reactionary anti-progressive and conservative.

Please wait...

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